Breakthroughs: Starlink + Next-Gen Batteries = Viable Homesteads
A growing number of people, fed up with dysfunctional cities and craving a simpler/safer life, are fantasizing about homesteading. But only a tiny fraction of that group has actually made the move. Why? Because that level of self-sufficiency is vastly harder than it looks.
Or…at least it was vastly harder. Two breakthroughs might revolutionize the homesteading concept:
Starlink
Anyone who’s been stuck with slow Internet service knows what a bottleneck it creates.
Communicating with the broader world and researching important questions, let alone actually working online, requires more bandwidth than is available in many rural areas, leaving people who might prefer small towns or homesteads stranded in dysfunctional cities and their suburbs.
But Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet network has solved that problem by offering fast, simple Internet pretty much everywhere, making bucolic little towns just as viable for digital workers as downtown Los Angeles.
Next-Generation Batteries
Millions of acres of otherwise farmable land are outside the range of local power grids. But off-grid life is, with today’s solar/battery tech, prohibitively expensive and complex.
That, too, might be changing, thanks to some wild new battery designs that are claimed to be near commercialization. If even one of them lives up to their hype, it will revolutionize electric cars, while slashing the cost and complexity of off-grid life. Here’s an excerpt from an article on one of these new batteries’ impact on homesteading:
The Off-Grid Revolution: Personal Energy Independence Unleashed
If real, the Donut Lab battery is not merely a better EV component; it is the keystone for a wholesale defection from centralized systems. For decades, true off-grid living has been hampered by the limitations of lead-acid or lithium-ion storage: high cost, limited lifespan, fire risk, and poor performance in extreme temperatures. A battery with a 274-year lifespan, ultra-fast charging, and supreme safety would make energy independence not just feasible but economically superior. Individuals and families could harness solar or wind power, store it reliably for weeks or months, and become utterly immune to grid blackouts, soaring utility rates, and the whims of distant corporate or government energy managers.
The self-reliant homestead transforms from a lifestyle choice into a powerhouse of productivity. This battery could power not just a home’s lights and appliances, but also electric vehicles, farm equipment like tractors and harvesters, workshops, and even personal AI inference engines for research, creativity, and business—all running on free, harvested sunlight. The economic empowerment is staggering. It eliminates recurring fuel costs, complex internal combustion engine maintenance, and grid dependency fees, dramatically lowering the cost of living and productive work for individuals and smallholders. As highlighted in analysis of decentralization trends, the convergence of robust battery tech, robotics, and local AI creates a ‘decentralization trifecta’ that strips away dependencies on monopolies controlling power, labor, and intelligence.
Delusion or Reality?
Starlink is here and apparently living up to its promises. So it comes down to next-gen batteries. And the number of new designs that are claimed to be near commercialization is growing. See Donut and Samsung.
Hype is inherently untrustworthy, so nothing is guaranteed at this point. But better batteries would make our goals of resilience and self-sufficiency dramatically easier to achieve. So this is definitely worth watching.
As for Starlink, I can attest to its reliability. I live in North Idaho in the woods, on a mountain, and we've been using Starlink for over 2 years. It FAR outperforms fiber, DSL, and cable. We've lived in a couple of major cities and several suburbs, and Starlink is fast and FAR more reliable than any service we've had. I've had HughesNet the first time we lived in ID—it was a total nightmare. After a local point-to-point wireless ISP in the area built a tower, I had them install a directional antenna 40 ft on top of a tree. It swayed in the wind and still had far greater performance than HughesNet did on a sunny day. Then I had them move the antenna to a 40 ft utility pole. So I've been through the ringer with ISPs—I think 14 different ones including Starlink. I was somewhat skeptical of Starlink when I first bought it, but if the performance and reliability continue like this, then I don't ever want another service unless some new better tech comes out. I say all this as a Senior DevOps Engineer who has been working remotely for 8 years now, so internet connections are kind of important for me. ;-)
As for batteries, I've been following them for many years and built several of my own battery packs with multiple cells and BMS. I'm skeptical of the "solid state" claims out there, but I'm still hopeful. I'm not a chemist or physicist, so what do I know? But right now, my money is on sodium-ion batteries, especially in the cold environment I live in. I hope to buy a place that is on-grid and then build out a high-quality solar and wind power system. You have to build them big up here since the winters get a lot less light, but being in my early 40s, I want to plan for the least hassle in the future, so buy quality and design for self-reliance in general.
We are renting on a rural property, but it's on the grid thankfully. But we hope to buy in the next year or two, outright with our silver, after the housing market collapses (which it is). We sold high in 2022 and moved back here in 2024.
This is the exit-and-build thesis in hardware form. For decades, the argument against rural self-sufficiency was 'you'll be cut off from everything.' Starlink killed that argument. Next-gen batteries kill the energy dependency argument. What's left? Zoning regulations and permitting. Which tells you where the real resistance to independence lives: not in physics, but in policy.